What's perhaps less obvious is that emotions also let us
communicate with ourselves.

That might sound weird. Aren't we necessarily privy to everything
we're thinking and feeling, all the time?

Unfortunately not.

According to Susan David, a psychologist at Harvard Medical
School and the author of "Emotional
Agility," people are notoriously oblivious to what their
emotions are trying to tell them. We can feel sad, or angry, or
frustrated, and wallow in our misery instead of thinking about
why we're struggling and what we can do about it.

Which is why David recommends that whenever you're feeling an
intense emotion, you stop and ask yourself one question:
"What the func?"

"Func" here is a nickname for "function," so essentially you're
asking yourself what the function of your current emotion is.
Consider it emotional archaeology: You're digging beneath the
surface of your feelings to figure out why they arose in the
first place.

Here's David:

"The time to kind of ask, "What the func?" is when you've got an
emotion that's there, that comes back, that might even come back
time and time again around a particular situation. Trying to kind
of discern the function beneath that emotion is critical."

David shared a personal example about a time when she could have
made her life a lot easier by asking, "What the func?"

Years ago, David was working as a technical writer in New
Zealand. She found the job incredibly unfulfilling.

Here's what she told me:

"I was getting more and more frustrated and I would go out with a
colleague of mine and we would moan at lunch and we would vent to
each other and we would do this whole thing which a lot of people
do. But then I would come back to the workplace and I would play
nice and get on with my job.

"And when I was able to really step back and say, what is the
function of this frustration? What is the function of the anger?
What is it that I'm feeling frustrated about here? …

"What I was able to discern is that autonomy is really important
to me, that being able to make choices and to be able to have
flexibility around my time was really important. And that
particular job was not going to give that to me."

David took that knowledge about her personal desire for autonomy
and used it to inform her
job search going forward. In other words, she didn't just
experience the ongoing emotion of frustration — she learned from
it.

If you've found yourself in a similar situation, but don't have
the opportunity to start looking for another job, David said
there are ways to make your current work more satisfying.

Psychologists call this process "job
crafting": You tweak aspects of your job so that it's more
meaningful, and lines up better with your personal values.

Maybe, David said, that requires having a conversation with your
boss about your responsibilities. Or, if you're frustrated with a
team member, you might want to have a conversation with them.

Once you recognize what your feelings are trying to tell you,
David said, "you're able to move forward in a way that's
constructive and in a way that's intentional."

Read: You're not blowing up at your colleagues or rolling your
eyes every time they speak. The great thing about getting to the
bottom of your emotions is that they no longer control your
behavior — you decide how to act in a rational way.

"I'm making a choice about how I want to bring myself to the
conversation with them," David said, "so that I can make things
better."